THAT bloody engagement...

Yes, Wills and Kate. Kate and Wills.

I couldn't really give a toss about their engagement, apart from the fact that the BBC, in its capacity as Lickspittle Pursuivant, saw fit to slip in an unscheduled half-hour drivelfest on Tuesday night after Newsnight, thus delaying 'The Secret Life of the National Grid' (Part 2) and causing my timer-recording of that programme to end halfway through it!

McTodd was distinctly unimpressed and rendered the air several shades of blue...

Meanwhile, here is the complaint I emailed to the BBC using their online contact form - I might add that I have yet to receive a response:

Dear BBC

You unspeakable bastards.

I write in reference to your sickeningly obsequious extra programme (‘William and Kate – A Royal Engagement’) following yesterday evening's 'Newsnight', reporting – a word I use in the loosest possible sense of the term – the engagement of some heir to the throne to an upper middle-class woman of no objectively discernible distinction.

Thanks to this wanton act of sycophancy, my advance-timed recording of Part 2 of the excellent and informative documentary series 'The Secret Life of the National Grid' was utterly ruined, the recording having ended only halfway through the delayed broadcast.

I was not aware that the BBC still clung to the moribund social mores of the 1930s by insisting on treating everything the royal family does with a level of reverence not seen since the days of Lord Reith and the Abdication Crisis, or even Sir Alastair Burnett's famously toadying reportage. What next? Live coverage of the Queen blowing her nose next time she has a cold? In sharp contrast, the excerpt I saw recently of North Korean state television news coverage of the ascension of Kim Jong-il's son to heir-apparent of that troubled land was a model of decorum and proportion in comparison with this televisual farrago.

Having been a lifelong defender of the BBC license fee, an increasingly minority position in these days of market forces and economic despondency, I feel my loyalty to the Corporation's values sorely tested by this frankly disgusting and annoying last-minute lash-up of a programme and its insensitive, not to mention inept, scheduling.

Not only is the fact that it ruined my viewing of 'The Secret Life of the National Grid' – a prime example, incidentally, of the type of programming for which the license fee can be ably justified – in itself infuriating in the extreme, I am also disgusted at the fathomless cravenness of the Corporation in pandering to the type of braindead rightwing cretin who reads the 'Daily Mail' and whips out a Union Jack every time a royal is within forty miles of them.

To cap it all, what little I could bring myself to watch of this inadvertantly-recorded atrocity revealed a production of such rank sentimentality, ineptitude and servility as to utterly vitiate whatever kindly disposition I may have hitherto had towards the Corporation. The idea that you consider it fitting coverage of what is, by any objective criteria, a distinctly minor event by wheeling out rancid toadies such as Piers Morgan or sweaty oleaginous royalists such as Andrew Roberts – men of whom there should be a public warning preceding any television appearance they make – is a sad indictment of the risible editorial values that threaten to destroy the BBC and lose it the last vestiges of public support. Furthermore, any programme that features witless privately-educated wastrels who are happy to be referred to in public as 'Ollie' is deserving of nothing but boundless contempt.

Your behaviour with regard to this non-event has been in every sense shameful, incompetent and thoughtless. I trust that you will go some way to compensating for this egregious error of judgement by repeating 'The Secret Life of the National Grid' (Part 2) so that those of us who do not enjoy last-minute so-called 'documentaries' about the blonde descendants of inbred German robber barons and their tediously predictable upper middle-class fiancees may enjoy the scheduled programming.

Yours in utter disgust

McTodd

For Fox sake...

Liam Fox, the Cleggeronic Libservative Coalescence Defence Secretary, has form - remember when he lost his laptop?

But now he's scared.

He's scared that naughty dusky-skinned foreign ne'er-do-wells will explode a nuclear weapon in space with the resulting electromagnetic pulse (EMP) frying our dainty little computer circuits and causing an apocalpyse!

This is the terrifying picture he paints with his word-brush:

Weapons detonated in our upper atmosphere would create an electro-magnetic pulse and knock out our satellites and electricity grid.

This would be worse than a direct nuclear strike such as that which targeted Hiroshima in World War II, Dr Fox said.

Oh my God, worse than having an atomic bomb land on your head?

Just how bad would that be?

Dr Fox elucidates:

Transport systems, computers, phones, fridges and water networks would all be brought to a halt, he added.

Fuck me, that is terrifying.

Just think how much worse it could have been for the hapless victims of the fifteen-kiloton blast at Hiroshima as their eyeballs were melted by the flash from an explosion brighter than a thousand suns:


Bugger me, she got off lightly...

Cat Twat: "It was a joke!"

So the miserable hag who chucked a cat in a wheelie bin has been identified as fat 45-year old drinker Mary Bale:



She claims she did it because she "thought it would be funny"!

Well, Mary, do you know what I think would be funny?

I think it would be hilarious if somebody kicked you in the cunt so fucking hard your ovaries popped.

The Atheist-Team

I have been a member of b3ta* for many many moons now, but it is only today that I finally got a frontpage! Hoorah pour moi!

I got it with this (click for vastitude):


*Teh interweb's premier home of photoshopped nonsense

Moat Madness...

Grim as the unfolding saga of steroid-ridden bodybuilder-turned-murderous rampaging gunman Raoul Moat was, I couldn't help but laugh at some of its media manifestations.

First, the magnificent photo, reproduced everywhere in the British media, of gritty armed policemen stalking the fugitive gunman...


The Grauniad captioned the photo 'Police point guns and stunguns towards Moat'.

More accurate, I feel, would have been 'Gurning policeman auditions for You've Been Framed' or 'Gurning policeman finds rampaging gunman drama a bit of a laugh'. What was he thinking as the camera pointed his way? "I'll put me gritty face on, you never know, I might get a part in The Bill"?

EDIT: It has been suggested by various people that the gurning policeman may, in fact, be shouting at the photographers to get back. Now that I look at the photo more carefully, this seems a very plausible explanation, the copper's apparent snarl merely being a warning caught mid-shout by the eager snapper's camera shutter. If this is the case, then I apologise unreservedly for casting aspersions on a professional doing a tough job.

But even better was the news that Paul 'Gazza' Gascoigne, famous alcoholic nutter and one-time ball-botherer, appeared on a Geordie radio show pledging support to his old mate Moat.

The cherry on this particular newscake was the quote from his agent:

Gascoigne's agent, Kenny Shepherd, said: "He's doing what? I am sitting having an evening meal in Majorca. I'm speechless."

A wonderful scene is conjured of Mr Shepherd being phoned during his meal and told what Gazza's done now followed by a stream of half-chewed paella and four-letter amazement projecting from his mouth...

Silly Mugger...

I was mugged the other day. Saturday night, to be exact. Well, Sunday morning, to be anally precise.

This is the third time I’ve been mugged since moving to London in 1997.

The first was a brutal affair, back in 1999, as I was grabbed at knifepoint by three bastards who nicked everything on me, including my bankcard, with which they also emptied my tenuous account, before kicking the shite out of me. But they didn’t stab me, which was a victory of sorts.

A few years later, after a thoroughly lubricated evening down the pub, I was robbed at knifepoint by a little scrote who came up to me, asked for a pound, and then pressed a knife into my ample gut and demanded everything I’d got. This consisted of around £3.50 in change. He was genuinely aggrieved at this, whining, “Is that it?” as if expecting me to reply, “I'm terribly sorry, I forgot this Faberge egg stuffed in my back pocket.” It was my turn to be irritated at this point, and I explained, as if to an especially dim school child, that my pissed state was indicative of an evening in the pub and that, therefore, he was lucky I had as much as £3.50 left on me...

Last Saturday’s affair was even more feeble, demonstrating both a lack of commitment and a want of intelligence on the part of the mugger. I was proceeding in a homeward direction, having availed myself of a refreshing non-alcoholic drink at some friends’ flat (after a victorious pub quiz evening), when a youth in a hoodie (not at all a stereotype, then) ran up to me from behind, swung in front of me and said, one hand deep in a pocket and pushing out the front of his jacket, “I’ve got a gun, gimme everything.”

He looked more nervous than I was, so I handed over some small change, and with his free hand he patted down my pockets and took my phone and a memory stick, before patting a lump in a small pocket and asking, “Whassat, then?” “Those are my house keys.” “Oh right, I’ll leave you those.” Cheers, I thought, how chivalrous. Which, in the circumstances, it was. After grabbing my bag (which contained my Spitting Image Series 3 DVD, the bastard) he legged it. He completely missed the other pocket with my wallet, containing my bankcard, Oyster card, and £60 in cash. The knob-end.

Each time I’ve been mugged, it’s been a progressively pathetic affair, characterised more and more by idiocy tempered with almost a residual chivalry.

At this rate, I confidently expect, around 2015, to be mugged by some berk dressed as a Regency fop who will flounce up to me, wave a scented handkerchief around my nose, and lisp, “Stap me vitals, sirrah! Would you be so kind as to furnish me with the contents of your pockets, my good man?”

To which I shall reply, “Fuck off.”

On This Day… 9 June 1870

London, 9 June 1870

MUCH CONVERSATION in fashionable salons of late has concerned that most wondrous invention, the electrical telegraphic transmitting-and-receiving engine, or ‘telegraph’ for brevity of terminology. In an effort to impart to our loyal readers the requisite degree of informed comment, we felt it incumbent upon ourselves to solicit the opinion of a savant possessed of acknowledged expertise in such arcane natural scientifical matters, and approached, most humbly, Sir Isambard Kingdom Perkins (Bart) BSc, PhD, FRS, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Electrovoltaic Studies at the University of Oxford.

“The electrical telegraphic transmitting-and-receiving engine, or, as I shall henceforth refer to it for reasons of brevity and clarity, the ‘telegraph’, is a most complex device typical of the cascade of miraculous inventions which prove that Man is, indeed, the highest of God’s multitude of creations,” elucidated the prodigious savant.

Explaining that the new ‘telegraph’ represented a prodigious advance upon earlier communicatory techniques, such as the shoutophore, in which lines of men spaced every fifty yards shouted the message to each other, Sir Isambard waxed lyrical of the communications revolution this powerful new technology has opened before Mankind’s very eyes. “We now survey,” he stated, with a not unseemly degree of scientifically motivated excitement evident in the jaunty angle at which he set his top-hat, “the vista of untold thousands of ‘telegraphs’ around the world forming an ‘Information Superior Railway’. This is unifying as never before our great Empire, as thousands upon thousands of telegraphic cables gird the globe, criss-crossing each other o'er land and ocean in an extraordinary mesh which some of my more irreverent colleagues have termed the ‘World Wide Crinoline’.”

However, a cautionary note was sounded by the esteemed moral campaigner, Mr William Booth Esq., who warned of the capacity for this miraculous invention to deprave and corrupt the moral fibre of the nation by facilitating the spread of confidence trickery, ribaldry and general beastliness. “Why, only this morning,” Mr Booth told us, the colour draining from his face, “I received several unsolicited telegrams, one purporting to be from a dispossessed Prince of Ruritania, humbly offering to pay me a thousand in sterling to help him transfer a hundred-thousand guineas from his embargoed bank account if I would only first of all wire him a hundred pounds, another that started, ‘There was a young man named Blunt,’ and worst of all, an offer to make my top-hat taller…!”